My Father, My President

by Doro Bush Koch

  Dad first joined the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center Board of Visitors in 1977, when he and Mom moved back to Houston at the start of the Carter administration. Since losing Robin, Mom and Dad have both always had an interest in helping in the fight against cancer, and M. D. Anderson had a sterling reputation as a world leader in cancer research and treatment. When my parents returned to Washington in the Reagan administration, however, Dad temporarily resigned from the board—but that didn’t stop him from donating the proceeds from his 1987 campaign biography, Looking Forward, to the hospital.

  After the White House, Dad reconnected with the Board of Visitors and became increasingly drawn into its work—or make that pulled. Around the time of his seventy-fifth birthday and this second parachute jump, the head of M. D. Anderson, Dr. John Mendelsohn, approached Dad about becoming chairman of the Board of Visitors. “We explained to him that becoming chairman involved two years as the vice chairman, then two years as chairman-elect, and then two years as chairman. So it’s a six-year deal.”

  Upon hearing of the six-year commitment, Dad turned to Jean Becker and kiddingly said, “This is harder than being president!” But he agreed to accept the appointment.

  Over the years, Dad has raised literally tens of millions of dollars for M. D. Anderson. He attends many events at the hospital, and he hosts an annual fund-raiser for the hospital every summer at Kennebunkport. Jean Becker said, “He makes a difference in big ways and little ways, and sometimes he’ll say to me, ‘Jean, I just don’t think I’m doing enough. I have to do more.’ And I’ll just roll my eyes and say, ‘How much more can you possibly do?’”

  In addition to M. D. Anderson, Dad has also been actively involved in the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships program, which he chaired for four years; and the Points of Light Foundation, of which he is still the honorary chairman. He also has been very active with First Tee, a PGA Tour- sponsored program created by Dad’s friend Commissioner Tim Finchem to make golf more accessible to kids from every background.

  In March 1998, Dad received a letter from his friend Vic Gold admonishing him for comments that were very critical of the national press. Out there on the speaker’s circuit, Dad would frequently knock the heck out of the Beltway press—and no matter where he was, he received a standing ovation from the crowd in response.

  “It felt good doing it,” Dad confessed.

  But Vic, whom Dad respects a lot, thought such behavior was beneath Dad as a former president, so Dad joshingly decided he would start a new organization called Press Bashers Anonymous in order to help him stay “clean.”

  He did very well for the first year, then my brother George declared his candidacy for president—and the last seven years have been a roller-coaster ride of relapses and recovery.

  “The love/hate thing with the press has gone on forever,” Dad said. “In a fit of anger in 1992—when I thought I was grossly, unfairly treated—I went back and looked at some of the things they were saying about Grover Cleveland, and it was the same thing. It’s ever thus.”

  As for his own relations with individual members of the national press, Dad has gradually softened his hard edge against most members of the fourth estate. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times said, “I think he gained respect for me during the Clinton administration, when he realized that I treated all presidents—not just Republicans—with the same skepticism and tweaking style.”

  Maureen went on to tell me about the time she brought her mother to a White House Christmas party one year, and Dad kissed her mother when she came through the receiving line. “In the car on the way home, she was quiet for a while and then said in an ominous voice, ‘I never want you to be mean to that man again.’ She kept a framed picture of that night—with her, me, your dad and mom—near the chair she sat in for years after she lost the ability to walk or see. Her last vote in 2004 was for your brother.”

  My favorite Maureen Dowd column was the one she let her brother Kevin write for her one Christmas Eve. He lauded the job the president was doing. I wish she’d let Kevin write her column every day!

  Dad, though angry at Maureen’s attacks on the president, genuinely likes her. “I know this is a hard one to understand,” he told me. “It’s just a dad thing.” He does, however, remain totally disenchanted with the New York Times, feeling the paper is merciless toward my brother and that it is guilty of editorializing.

  For the first four and a half years after leaving the White House, my father’s personal aide, Michael Dannenhauer, went just about everywhere with Dad. They had developed a very close relationship, but all that time Michael also lived with a deeply held fear.

  “All those years I always wondered if the president assumed I was gay,” Michael said. “Obviously, I was never going to say anything to him about it. In 1998, when he asked me to serve temporarily as chief of staff, in the back of my mind I wondered if he would want me to be his chief of staff if he knew I was gay. Would he be embarrassed by me? Would he want to fire me?”

  Michael confided first in his sister Beth and then in Jean Becker, Dad’s chief of staff who was taking time off to help Dad write All the Best. Jean asked Michael if he planned to tell Mom and Dad, and Michael emphatically shot that idea down, thinking it would be far too awkward a conversation. However, Michael was just as emphatic that Jean tell the truth if she was asked about it—just as he would.

  In December 1998, Michael was in Dad’s office for an early-morning meeting. Dad’s longtime assistant Linda Poepsel was also in the office, and after she left, Dad asked Michael to close the door. My father was seated behind his desk, and Michael stood in front assuming it would be a short conversation. Unknown to Michael, Dad had been at his library at Texas A&M the previous day with Jean, and the two had discussed Michael.

  “Now, don’t be mad at Jean,” Dad started the conversation. “Don’t be mad at Jean, because I asked her. I asked her if you are gay.”

  Caught totally off guard, Michael sat down and put his head in his hands, unable to look at Dad.

  “I want you to know I don’t care,” Dad continued. “Barbara and I love you. You are a part of our family, and it doesn’t matter to us that you’re gay. I am not embarrassed of you and never will be.”

  Michael recalled that Dad’s eyes welled up and tears streaked down his cheeks.

  “I hope I have never said anything or done anything in our time together to make you feel less of a person,” Dad concluded. “I want you to be happy—that’s what is most important.”

  Since the state of Texas changed the terms of office for governor from two years to four years in the 1970s, no sitting governor of Texas had ever been reelected. In 1998, however, my brother George campaigned for reelection as a prohibitively strong incumbent with 70 percent support in Texas—and growing support nationally should he become a GOP candidate for president in 2000. Everywhere he went that year, Texans and reporters asked if he would seek the White House, and when he won that November with 69 percent of the vote, the speculation over his political future only intensified.

  Meanwhile, thanks to the way he handled a tough loss in 1994 and the constructive leadership he has shown on a host of issues in the interim, Jeb also found himself back on the campaign trail in Florida as an equally strong candidate for the GOP nomination—but facing a tough challenge in the general election against Lieutenant Governor Buddy McKay.

  Jeb campaigned hard all fall, and not until the exit polls started coming in on election day was he fully confident of the outcome. Dad was monitoring the exit polls from Houston as well, and once the numbers looked encouraging, he decided to lease a small plane and fly over to Miami with Mom to surprise Jeb that night.

  Dad recalled, “When we arrived, the campaign people asked if I wanted to introduce Jeb and I said, ‘Oh yeah. I’m very proud to introduce the new governor of the state of Florida.’ It was a very emotional thing to be able to do.”

  “I didn’t know they were coming,” Jeb told me. “I was pretty confident tha
t I was going to win, and to have them there was fantastic.”

  Dad used to tell this funny—perhaps fantasized—story. Flying back to Houston that night, with the light of New Orleans off in the distance, Dad looked out his window and said, “This has to be the happiest night of my life.”

  “What about the night we were married?” Mom shot back.

  “That was a very pleasant night, too!” Dad replied.

  On June 8, 2000, Mom turned seventy-five years old, and Dad had planned a big surprise party for her a few nights later at the Kennebunkport River Club. There were 176 guests, including family members, tons of her friends from throughout her life, all of Mom’s former aides dating back to the earliest days of Dad’s vice presidency, and other special invited guests. That night, Marvin emceed the toasts, skits, and singing—it was an unforgettable night.

  Like the Roger Whittaker surprise, however, Dad’s cover was blown at the last minute. The day before the party, Senator Alan Simpson called and said, “Listen, Bar, I know you are too smart not to have figured this out. So I’m not going to play the whole game here. Ann and I cannot be there, but wanted to wish you a happy birthday, and hope the party is great tonight.”

  Mom said, “You know, Alan, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you better hang up the phone right now.”

  Undeterred, Dad marked the occasion of Mom’s seventy-fifth birthday by presenting to her a photo of the “Ranking Committee.” It was then that so many people in Dad’s life would finally, at long last, come to learn the true identity of this infamous committee. Dad explained, “It is not a club. There are no members to it. Just an authority that ranks these jokes. People send them in, like yesterday I got one from Brent Scowcroft. One of them is fairly funny and the other one is not, so the Ranking Committee e-mails back, ‘You get seven on the one, four on the other. Try again.’ And so it’s fun. We’ve got several people in on it.”

  For so many years, Dad had referred to this secret committee whenever setting up competitions, judging a competition, or—these days—evaluating the jokes he receives via e-mail. The committee’s proceedings were always done in secret because “people would try to corrupt it,” Dad explained. What’s more, the committee’s word was absolute and final, and the committee did not like the whining about its rankings.

  Something wasn’t quite right when we first saw the photo of the Ranking Committee, however. The five members appeared to be diverse—there were two women and three men—but they all had the same face . . . Dad’s face, to be precise.

  “How does his mind work?” Jean Becker asked. “Where did that come from? And, of course, we took that picture on a day when he had a hundred things that I thought were really important—but we had to drop everything to get the local photographer up here.”

  Dad posed three different times—as a golfer, as a businessman in a suit and tie, and as a hard-core motorcycle biker with a bandana or do-rag on his head with dark sunglasses and a jean jacket vest. For the ladies in the photo, Dad’s longtime assistant Linda Poepsel sat in one chair with her professional attire while Jean donned an Arabic robe. Dad’s face was superimposed on Linda and Jean.

  “The biker costume, I wish we knew where that came from,” Jean said. “He left that on forever. There’s actually a picture in my office in Kennebunkport of him as the biker with everyone who was in the office that day. He loved walking around as the biker person, and I finally had to tell him to go change because he had an appointment.”

  On June 12, 1999, in Austin, my brother George declared his candidacy for president of the United States. Then he flew to Iowa, New Hampshire, and other politically important states aboard a campaign plane dubbed Great Expectations. At the end of the month, his campaign announced they had raised a jaw-dropping $36 million in the first half of 1999—twice as much as Vice President Gore. George’s campaign was off to a flying start.

  After the sheer agony of 1992, I was awed by my brother having the fortitude to mount his own presidential challenge. True, George came to the starting line with an enviable political name; but as he put it at the time, he “inherited only half of Dad’s friends and all of his enemies.” He would still have to prove himself and lead a team with little experience at the national level through the killing fields of primary politics.

  Looking back, George told me that he felt free to make his own decision about running for president—and not worry about the consequences if he was not successful—because of the unconditional love he has always received from Mom and Dad.

  “There is an enormous spotlight on you, as well as pressure,” George said. “If I sat and agonized and thought, ‘Gosh, if I lose, I’ll diminish the family name,’ I wouldn’t have run if that had been my psyche. I never thought that way. The only thing I was concerned about was, one, did I want to put my own family through this media meat grinder, and two, was I prepared to, upon victory, be in a position where there would be no such thing as anonymity— because if you win, you are forever made president.”

  Dad, meanwhile, was easing his way into the campaign. Of course, he was completely interested in seeing George do well and helping him in any way, but at the outset, his first and foremost concern was that he didn’t want to be a burden.

  “He thought that if he were to get involved early on, it would dredge up Republican fears of 1992,” recalled Dad’s traveling aide Gian-Carlo Peressutti, “so he really downplayed his role to everybody during the exploratory committee phase. Then that kind of morphed from ‘I’m really not going to be involved’ to ‘I can see I can play a helpful role in raising money, and so that’s going to be my role.’”

  So as he traveled around the country keeping his own engagements, Dad started doing a few fund-raising events. For example, if he would give a speech to a business group in Charlotte, North Carolina, George’s campaign would tack on a fund-raising event while Dad was there.

  “As the primaries got closer, the president did in fact end up doing more political events,” Gian-Carlo added. “The political events he did really were events to motivate the base.”

  Dad and Mom even surprised George one time at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, which turned out to be a very emotional event for two reasons: first, because we were able to keep it a complete surprise; and second, because it was the first time that Dad and George appeared together at a campaign event for the presidency.

  As we had with Dad, our entire family threw ourselves into George’s campaign. I traveled around to all the primary states for George W. with my sister-in-law, Tricia Koch. One assignment we got was to go to Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the first town to cast the first votes in the first primary of the presidential election. The voting takes place at midnight at the Balsams Hotel in the famous “Ballot Room.”

  This tradition began in 1960 when Dixville Notch was granted the right to conduct its own elections. It is important to candidates because it attracts national and international media attention. Some old New Hampshire veterans would say, as Dixville Notch goes, so goes the nation—and as far as I was concerned, this was an important assignment. So Tricia and I left the main headquarters in Concord and hopped into a four-wheel-drive vehicle with a volunteer driver to head up to Coos County, which borders Canada.

  The weather report called for snow, so our Texas-born volunteer driver thought it best if we stopped for “survival” supplies just in case. That was a bit worrisome, but we were on a mission to win the first votes for my brother. So we packed up a first-aid kit, water, some snacks, and headed out. Four-plus hours later, we survived whiteout conditions where we occasionally couldn’t tell the road from the forest and made it to the Balsams Hotel in the White Mountains.

  After we arrived, we were told that we couldn’t blatantly ask people for votes, as we were in the room where votes were actually cast. Arizona Senator John McCain had already been to Dixville Notch and had handed out signed copies of his book. Had we known, I would have come armed with signed books—lots
of people in my family had written books, including a few dogs. That would have been easy. Instead, we immediately felt at a disadvantage. Still, there was no doubt whom we were there for, as we were clad in George W. Bush gear from head to toe.

  Another interesting rule in the Dixville Notch vote is that voters can declare or change their party affiliation on the night of the vote. So everyone was a potential vote for George W. Bush, and Tricia and I were determined to get the majority. We did everything else we could think of—winks, nods, hugs—to get the votes of the twenty-nine citizens of Dixville Notch who showed up that night.

  As the night wore on, the tension built. Midnight finally came and the votes were announced. For the Democrats: four votes for Senator Bill Bradley and two votes for Al Gore. For the Republicans: twelve votes for George W. Bush, ten votes for John McCain, and one vote for Steve Forbes. (How’d we miss that one vote?)

  At that moment, you would have thought we had won the entire election in a landslide. Tricia and I were bouncing off the walls with excitement. The joy carried over into the next morning on our car ride back to headquarters. We ran into the headquarters thinking everyone would be celebrating, but unfortunately, that was not the case. Early statewide polling results were beginning to come in, and things were not looking so good. The New Hampshire primary loss to Senator McCain in 2000 ended up being as hard a loss as the win in the Iowa caucus was encouraging.

  But George regained his footing with a solid win in South Carolina, won nine out of the thirteen Super Tuesday states, and took a lead in delegates he never relinquished from that point on. On February 15, he won the Delaware caucus, and I was asked to make his official acceptance speech as winner. I have heard many acceptance speeches over the years, but this was the first—and only—time I would ever be making one. It was my big moment. I worked hard on the speech, practicing it over and over. As I was giving the speech, however, I realized that an acceptance speech is only interesting if it is being delivered by the person who actually won the election.